He Wanted To Hold Office, His Family Needed a Paycheck

A True Story.

Over the years, I've worked with men who want to pursue something so badly that they put their family’s needs and comforts on the back burner. I had a man ask me one time about how he should go about to get started in politics. I asked him what he did for a living and he told me he was unemployed.

I asked him how his family was getting by and he said they were living off a few months worth of savings in the bank. His hope was that he could run a campaign over the next year, get elected and live off the salary of the position. In the meantime, his plan was to figure out a living along the way.

I told him that was a terrible plan. I told him his family needed him to be a provider more than his town needed him to be a mayor and it would be better if he secured a job before putting his family at risk of losing everything because he didn’t have reliable income to provide for them.

This was sound advice, but he already had ideas of where his political career would be taking him and I quickly learned there wasn’t anything I could say to get him to consider his family first. He wasn’t strong enough to do his duty as a husband and a father – he was crippled by his own ego and his family was feeling the pain as they limped along month to month.

Don't be that guy. In the Marines I learned a very valuable principle "Leaders Eat Last." It’s also the title of a good book by Simon Sineck about the principle of leadership that requires you put the welfare, moral, and comfort of the people following you ahead of your own. In a family, someone is always carrying the weight. Sometimes it is equally distributed but when it gets heavy, usually someone bears more of the load than others. When there is an imminent burden to bear, such as, how are we going to pay for groceries, or the next months rent, don't allow your ego and ambition to compete with the needs of your family. Rather, your family should be your ambition and your ego should be used to satisfy their needs long before you use it to satisfy your own appetites.